As I am staring 2017 straight in the face I’m really not sure what it will hold or what I will bring to it. I feel like I am at such a crossroads in my life. I can see what I want it to look like, I’m just not sure how to get there, or maybe how best to get there. There is a part of me that just wants to run off to an island, totally isolated, not worrying about all the trivial things that sometimes preoccupy so much of my mind. Would that work, would all my troubles disappear…probably not, but it’s a nice thought sometimes. So what can I do…

A Year of Simple Living

I do know that I want to structure my life in a way where I actually enjoy whatever it is that I am doing. I want to be present and focused. I want to develop a habit of staying in the moment. I want to wake up every morning and feel grateful for another day.

I want to look whoever I am talking to in the eye and give them my full attention instead of worrying about all the other things I “need” to be doing. I don’t want to be thinking about how I am going to answer them, I want to just listen. How nice would that be?

I want to focus on single-tasking instead of multi-tasking. Multi-tasking leads to stress, it divides our focus and causes us to lose the ability to live in the moment.

I want to appreciate nature. I want to look at the sky, watch the squirrel look for a nut it buried last month. Stop and listen to the wind, feel it on my skin.

I want to slow down and savor my food, you know actually sit down and eat it instead of standing at the counter cleaning up the dishes while I’m trying to eat my lunch. I want to taste it, really taste it. I want to be mindful of my food, where and how I am eating it.

I want to live a better quality of life with less stress. Life can be so much more than just getting through another day. Life can be an amazing adventure.

I think this quote by Abraham Lincoln sums it up best. “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”

First, let me start this by saying that I am not against social media. I think it can be a good thing and can enhance people’s lives. It makes it convenient to reach out to people when you need support and it can keep people connected, although I do feel like many of those connections are disingenuous (more about that in a bit).

What Has Facebook Become?

It can be fun looking at pictures of your friends and their families, it is nice reading about important things that are going in their life… big announcements, a move, a promotion. All of those things are great and it makes it easy to reach out and to congratulate them. But I feel like it has become so much more than that. Facebook has become a place where people share practically every little detail of their life. Starting from how they did or did not sleep that night to what they had for breakfast, to having to sit in traffic, or having to wait at the post office, to being put on hold while making a service call…..omg the list could go on and on. So what happens when we are bombarded with all of this information every single day. Depending on how many people you have on your feed, that is a lot shit to wade through multiple times a day. No one makes us look at Facebook and read all of this but we do it, we do it without even thinking about it and I think some actually feel obligated to do it….or maybe it’s FOMO (fear of missing out). I think FOMO is huge. People do not send letters any more, hell we rarely even email, I mean why do that when you get to see almost every detail by just logging on to FB. You feel like you know what’s happening in everyone’s life. Of course you don’t because the majority of people only put out the distorted best of what is happening. We really have no idea of what is really going on but we feel like we do and that makes us happy…..until it doesn’t.